Shell Programming and Scripting

I am defining an awk function (Solaris v8 ksh) of:
function firstletter {
echo "$line" | awk '{get=substr($1,1,1);print get}' | read FL
}

I am starting a wile loop with a:
for line in `cat inputfile.lst`

When I call the function from within the for loop it works great fine. From within a while loop within the for loop it doesn't pull the next line from the input file. Do I need to define a getline loop (which I'm shakey on doing) or is there another way to make the function force jumping to the next line?
Thanks in advance for any replies.

...Gozer13

I diid some thing like this ...

Code:

function firstletter {
echo "$line" | awk '{get=substr($0,1,1);print get}'
}

while read line
do
     firstletter $line
done < file1

Another way:

Code:

#! /usr/bin/ksh
typeset -L1 fl

while read line ; do
        fl=$line
        echo $fl is 1st char of $line
done
exit 0

Another way is to use cut, e.g...

Code:

$ cat file1
aaa
bbb
ccc

$ cut -c1 file1
a
b
c

It's worth mentioning that you can redirect output to a function, e.g...

Code:

$ function firstletter {
>   cut -c1
> }

So that you can pipe the output of some command or redirect a file like this...

Code:

$ cat file1 | firstletter
a
b
c

$ firstletter < file1
a
b
c

$ < file1 firstletter
a
b
c

Thanks for the tips I appriciate it so much. Unfortuanatly after pulling all my hair out, I've concluded to scrap it and start over with if then statements. Maybe throw some wile loops in there. I'm glad you guys are here to help come to these painful conclusions.

...Gozer13